Madison Smartt Bell and his fiction tend to evade easy categories. As a writer who started publishing in the early 1980s, he was never affiliated with either the Minimalists or the "Brat Pack" novelists such as Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz. Grounded i...

Effusive critical acclaim can be as debilitating as it is gratifying for young writers. Madison Smartt Bell, named by critics very early in his career as one of the best writers of his generation, has been singularly unaffected by the enthusiastic critic...